Excerpt from “We Do Abortions Here” – Sallie Tisdale

This quote is from the Harper’s Magazine archive. We Do Abortions Here: A Nurse’s Story, is a powerful piece that goes beyond the well worn positions that are still being dragged about today. I recommend a full reading, go to Harper’s Archive to read it.

“Women have abortions because they are too old, and too young, too poor, and too rich, too stupid and too smart. I see women who berate themselves with violent emotions for their first and only abortion, and others who return three times, five times, hauling two or three children, who cannot remember to take a pill or where they put the diaphragm. We talk glibly about choice. But the choice for what? I see all the broken promises in lives lived like a series of impromptu obstacles. There are the sweet, light promises of live and intimacy, the glittering promise of education and progress, the warm promise of safe families, long years of innocence and community. And there is the promise of freedom: freedom from failure, from faithlessness. Freedom from biology. The early feminist defense of abortion asked many questions, but the one I remember is this: Is biology destiny? And the answer is yes, sometimes it is. Women who have the fewest choices of all exercise their right to abortion the most.”

A small slice of what the emancipation of women looks like can be found here. There is a distinct lack of ’empowerment’ and empty consumerist gestures in the second wave – just women liberating the space for women to make the tough calls in their lives as they see fit. It is not happy-fun-times, not empowerful, but rather it is the cold embrace of the bitter-sweet choices in life that, till recently, only half of the population was deemed worthy enough to experience.

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4 comments

I think that was the most powerful essay I’ve ever read on abortion. It’s also worth noting that it was written in 1987. I think the most powerful aspect of it was the ‘non-judgemental’ attitude prevailing. It’s such an emotional topic but I have never been able to figure out why there are so many people who think they can base others’ choices on what they, themselves, would choose. As she so successfully pointed out, women get pregnant under all sorts of circumstances . . how can any one person make a judgement call about every other woman, who may be experiencing such diverse circumstances from their own?
This article will stay in my brain for some time to come, I can tell. Thanks for featuring it.

It’s taken me a while to get round to reading it, and give it the time it merited. Kept it open in a tab so I didn’t forget. Carmen summed it up beautifully. It is non-judgemental, and that’s the real beauty of it.

It’s like the walk a mile in my shoes quote. How can anyone imagine what it is like to be in someone else’s circumstances? We can’t. What forcibly struck me was about the women who repeatedly forgot to take the pill or use a diaphragm (contraception being a woman’s responsibility, of course). Or just that, contraception fails. I used double contraception for a large part of my life because I did not want to get pregnant. Even after he’d had a vasectomy and been declared clear.

The last thing I would have wanted had I ever got pregnant would have been some religious (often male) fuckwit telling me I had to give birth. I hope there are still lots of Tisdales doing their job with compassion and sensitivity.